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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5914702" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've read a lot of published D&D modules and adventures (TSR, WotC and 3pp D20 ones) - admittedly not all of them , but many dozens, perhaps 100s - and have never seen one which is designed around the assumption, or even the significant possibility, that guards or soldiers will be bypassed by poisoning their lunch.It's rare enough to see an assumption, or even recognition, that they'll be bypassed by talking to them, or by sneaking past them/tricking them.And I don't think this is a coincidence, nor just driven by a preference for combat. It comes out of the action resolution mechanics. D&D has mechanics for sneaking (though non-thieves can tend to suck at it). It sort-of has mechanics for tricking and for talking, though this is somewhat edition dependent, and also has a tendency to be heavily GM-dependent. It has no mechanics for resolving an attempt to poison the guards' lunch. For a start, the timeframe over which this takes place - putting the poison in in the morning, then waiting for a couple of hours until the guards eat, then waiting more time until the poison takes effect - is not a timeframe that the action resolution mechanics typically handle that smoothly without need for a lot of GM-led narration to link it all together.In none of this am I disputing what you or your guys have done. But the fact that you've done stuff isn't, on it's own, changing my view about the published default, or the default orientation or capability of the mechanics. But if there's a particular Dragon article you think I should look at, please point me to it. I liked the old (pre-WotC) Dragon!I agree that scene-based play can tend to make exploration something that emerges out of conflict resolution, rather than something in its own right. I think there are ways of designing to correct for that, but they probably won't give the classic D&D feel.I'm not sure you can have the classic D&D feel, and have poisoning the guards being as robust an approach to action resolution as fighting them (or even talking to them).</blockquote>

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